Anything worth having has its price.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.